A Thread of Sky, page 11
“Nora—”
“What.” It came out a near sob.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She got up and focused on fixing her clothes. After a minute, so did he.
The phone rang. It was her mother. Was she packed? Was she bringing a hat? What about sunscreen? What might they both be forgetting?
“Yes,” Nora said robotically. “No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Is your alarm set? You want to stay over tonight? So we can head to the airport together?”
She said, “I’ll come over.”
“You will?” her mother exclaimed.
Nora hung up and pulled her suitcase upright. “I have to go.”
“Who was that?” Jesse asked.
She didn’t answer. She avoided his gaze, twisted away from his outstretched arms, turned her back as he left, saying it again: “Have a safe trip.” She heard the door shut.
And there sat the ring on her nightstand, glinting meanly. She grabbed it and pushed it in her pocket. She felt, at her core, a kind of gathering and hardening. Like a muscle she’d been flexing all her life, so that when the time came, it wouldn’t fail her.
But tonight, it had failed her.
The house was even more cluttered than Nora remembered, littered now with suitcases, carry-ons, printouts, takeout containers, even a baby spoon she’d used to feed Sophie. Perched above it all was the urn holding her father’s ashes. Gray granite with white streaks, cool and heavy and simply shaped. It had seemed to atone, as much as any receptacle could, for the indignity of his departure, of his corpse. It looked slightly off-center now. She reached up to adjust it. Her hands came off clean, as if it had just been dusted.
“You’re here!” Her mother flew out from her bedroom and pulled Nora into a tight hug. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re working too hard. This vacation will be just what you need.”
Sophie skulked out of her room. Nora hesitated, then hugged her. For the briefest moment, Sophie felt small and soft again.
Her mother beamed. “Two daughters back home, and soon I’ll have the third. Oh, look what Sophie got at graduation.” From a shelf full of awards, she lifted a new one—Sophie’s valedictorian plaque.
“Congratulations. I’m sorry I missed it. Work was hectic.” Nora had known she couldn’t bear an entire morning seated beside her mother in the audience.
“It was stupid,” Sophie said. “They named four valedictorians. We all had the same GPA.”
Sophie disappeared back into her bedroom. Nora sat on the edge of the couch. Her mother bustled around, proffering snacks and drinks, fussing over Nora’s luggage. Her mother asked about her work, her house, then Jesse.
Nora set her jaw. “We broke up.”
Her mother gaped. She’d hardly known Jesse; Nora had preferred it that way. She’d never shaken the sense that forging romantic relationships, intimate outside connections, somehow meant dispossessing her mother.
She said, “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Was there another woman?”
“What makes you think that?” Nora snapped.
“I just thought—weren’t you planning a future with him? Isn’t that why you wanted to live together?”
“Actually, he wanted marriage and kids. I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Nora was silent.
Hurriedly, her mother said, “So you’re in that house all alone? No wonder you wanted to stay over. You can stay over anytime, you know. I haven’t touched your room. If you want, we could fix it up. You could even move back.”
Nora recoiled. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”
Her mother smiled bravely. “Well, it’s perfect timing, isn’t it? For a holiday with family.”
Nora noticed her mother still wore her wedding ring. Those bands had always seemed so fixed on her parents’ fingers, she hadn’t remembered her father’s until the funeral director gave it to her, after the cremation. Nora couldn’t help thinking her mother ought to take off the ring, to stash it away. Her father had died leaving her mother. If he were alive and well in Maine, her mother wouldn’t be, to the world, a strong widow—only another wronged wife.
Avoiding her mother’s gaze, Nora stood up and said she was going to bed.
In her old room, she set down her suitcase beside her father’s luggage. She left the door ajar and opened a window, hoping for a breeze. The ring was a hard, solid lump in her pocket. A faint smell rose from her clothes, the clothes Jesse had pushed and tugged. She balled them up and stuffed them deep into a corner of her suitcase. From her dresser, she dug up a prim nightgown, never worn, that her father had bought at a going-out-of-business sale. He’d snapped up everything under five dollars, and she and her sisters hadn’t wanted any of it. Against her skin now, the nightgown was comforting, loose cotton, cool and sexless.
Long ago, this had been her grandmother’s room, bare of memento or adornment. Her grandmother used to sit in a recliner reading Chinese periodicals, her eyes traveling up and down the columns of characters, turning the pages from left to right. Sometimes Nora would lie on her stomach and do homework by Grandma’s slippered feet. Occasionally, they’d look up and joke: “You’re reading backward.” “No, you are.” They shared a kind of coziness that dissipated whenever her mother showed up. Nora would watch her mother lash out at Grandma, would overhear furious arguments she couldn’t understand. And when Grandma announced she was moving to California, where Uncle Lou lived, Nora had stomped to her mother and said, “It’s you. You drove her away.”
From downstairs, she could hear her mother still bustling around. She shut the door and lay in bed, unable to sleep, barely able to breathe.
“Look what I got.” Her mother presented a box of cookies and a bag of popcorn, beaming. They were at LAX, waiting for her grandmother.
Nora accepted a cookie. It cracked apart when she took a bite. “It’s stale,” she said, and dropped the pieces back in the box.
Her mother gave a determined smile. “Remember when you used to dictate what to serve for your birthday? Ice cream cakes, instant cake mix—whatever it was, you were so dead set.”
Nora said, “Shouldn’t Grandma be here by now?”
Her mother’s smile faded. “Lou’s probably late.”
Across the passageway, Sophie trudged out of the restroom, skirt riding up her thighs, hair hanging over her face, flip-flops barely lifting off the floor. Her body was curvier than Nora’s, but her face still looked unformed. She seemed to teeter between a babyish pliancy and a defiant sexuality. As she passed a sports bar, two men leaned over the counter, looking her up and down, while crisp travelers whisked by her, their carry-ons veering too close to her bare ankles. She was nearly eighteen, just a little younger than Jesse’s student teacher.
“Just in time,” her mother said, presenting the food and beaming again.
“I’m not hungry,” Sophie said.
“Oh, come on. Nora said the cookies are stale, but the popcorn’s still warm.”
“I said I’m not hungry.”
“But you didn’t eat anything on the plane.”
“Because I’m not hungry.”
“But—”
Exasperated, Nora said, “Give me the popcorn.”
Now the only sound among them was the crunch of popcorn in her teeth.
The reconnecting Nora once had in mind seemed less likely by the minute. On the flight over, they’d all adopted Sophie’s tactic—a sour, wary silence. Nora wondered if her mother thought the tension might magically lift once they set foot in their homeland.
There’d been a time when Nora kept hearing—from schoolmates, from strangers—how she ought to fly to China and find herself. These days, any references to her roots were ironic—except her mother’s. When she mentioned this trip at work, people only wanted to spout their own expertise. China was the next superpower. China was a bubble. The billion-plus potential consumers, how to grab a piece. Where to buy the best counterfeits. Of course, China was simply a place tourists wanted to see. The mist, the mountains. The immensity, the history. But the image Nora had gleaned from Kay was of an unsanitary country only a martyr would enter.
A strangely familiar scent wafted to her. Hand cream and vitamins, Tiger Balm and milk tea. A tap on her head—she started, the bag of popcorn falling to the floor.
Beneath a white cloud of hair and the wide curve of her forehead, her grandmother’s eyes glittered, keen and deep set. She looked much like the Grandma Nora remembered—solid and robust. She doesn’t have much time left, her mother had said. But her grandmother didn’t exude frailty, much less impending death.
“You haven’t aged at all,” Nora said.
“You’re still the same. Always fa dai.”
Nora was surprised she remembered that phrase—daydreaming, staring into space. Her grandmother used to scold her for it. Wei! she’d exclaim, or clap in front of Nora’s face, just missing her nose.
While her grandmother exchanged distant greetings with her mother and Sophie, Nora had the strange sense that she was regaining a long-lost confidante.
“Was Lou late?” her mother asked.
“I told him to stop so I could buy presents. A grandma should bring presents, right?” Her grandmother reached into her purse and brought out two necklaces—big loops of colorful plastic beads, both undeniably ugly.
Nora and Sophie chorused their thanks.
Frowning, her mother picked up the popcorn and cookies, dumped them in the trash, and started for the gates.
“Wait,” her grandmother said.
Nora turned back.
Her grandmother handed her a small round tin. She sniffed at it—dusty fruit and cool metal. Grandma used to produce a tin whenever Nora showed her a perfect test score, or stomped upstairs after arguing with her mother. Inside, enveloped in wax paper, were candies hard as marbles, coated with a mysterious powder that wasn’t sugar—it was like waiting itself, before the tart, sweet flavor came through. She looked up with a smile, but her grandmother was already briskly walking ahead.
She wondered if the grandma she remembered would console her now in a way her mother couldn’t—or if her heartbreak would seem trivial, unworthy of a former revolutionary’s notice.
At takeoff, Nora watched the landscape of palm trees and concrete tilt, miniaturize, and slide into the ocean. Once the plane started cruising through an unbroken pale blue, she reclined her seat and closed her eyes. She often napped more easily in motion. She’d wondered if her father had been lulled to the moment of death, or if he’d jolted conscious, tried to wrest back control of the car, before careening off the freeway.
She kept her eyes shut tight, twisted against her seat, finally fell into a cramped sleep.
She woke extremely unrefreshed. The recycled air carried a whiff of rotten peanuts. The flight attendants were making their laboriously chipper way down the aisles with meal carts. “Chicken or noodles? Chicken or noodles?” In some time zone, it was dinnertime.
Her grandmother chose noodles. Nora chose chicken. She ate a roll with frozen chips of butter, speared some overtenderized meat, and spooned out the spongy bottom of her cake, leaving the thick gelatinous top quivering. Soon their trays were collected, tray tables stowed. And that was dinner: an efficient, thorough simulation, pre-prepared and plastic-contained, instead of the trial she’d endured every night since Jesse left.
A movie was playing overhead, a romantic comedy—the kind of movie no one in her family would watch on land. In the row in front, her mother and Sophie had clamped on their headphones and turned their faces to the fuzzy screen. Beside her, Grandma rubbed ointment into her joints.
Politely, Nora asked, “Are you excited to go back to China?”
Her grandmother shrugged—a heavy, considered gesture.
Nora waited. Her grandmother was quiet. Nora turned to her window again. The sky was still cloudless, now cobalt, the horizon shot through with pink. On the overhead screen, a man was about to marry a woman, but since it was early in the movie, it had to be the wrong woman.
The seat belt sign lit up—turbulence ahead. Through the crevice between their seats, Nora craned to make sure her mother’s and sister’s seat belts were fastened. Her grandmother’s eyes were now closed, a blanket covering her seat belt. Gently, Nora reached to check it.
Grandma slapped her hand away with a barklike laugh. “You think I’ve never flown before?”
Disconcerted, Nora apologized.
The promised turbulence set in. Nora tried to let her body shake with the plane. Beside her, Grandma stared straight ahead, face placid.
What kind of woman will you be? Suddenly Nora remembered Grandma asking this, as she and Kay sat eating something sweet and sticky Grandma had made. A strong woman or a weak woman? Great or ordinary? The kind who holds us back, or the kind who pushes us forward? Nora said, A strong woman, and for good measure, added, A great woman. Kay, her mouth full, bobbed in agreement. Grandma asked, How? Nora said, I’ll beat boys at—she thought of the school math competition, outer space, the White House—whatever they do. Kay said, I’ll help people. Grandma said, Right. Because this—the sweep of her arm encompassing the kitchen, their own busy mouths and twiggy bodies, the whole house—is not enough.
“Still fa dai?”
“Sorry.” Her grandmother’s keen eyes were trained on her. Nora stammered, “Why did you leave Taiwan?”
“To help raise you and your sister.”
“But why did you leave—Grandpa?”
Grandma’s face tightened. “It was time.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
“No.”
Nora swallowed. “I just broke up with my—Jesse, my boyfriend.”
“You suffered, with your father’s accident. He didn’t hold up?”
“He did, but then—he wanted to marry me, and I kept putting him off, and—”
“What? Another woman?”
Nora could not admit it.
Her grandmother said, “In hard times, most men fail. Their true character shows. Be glad you didn’t tie your life to his.”
Nora nodded.
“So you got rid of him. You were not weak.” Her grandmother’s eyes were like feelers, probing for cracks.
“I threw him out.”
Her grandmother nodded.
“Your career is most important, of course. I don’t fully understand what you do, but I understand you control money. You have power among men. As a woman, you are considered a trailblazer.”
Nora hesitated. Didn’t that sum it up? She’d never considered finance until, having been lauded as valedictorian and “ass-kicker” of her high school, she entered Harvard and poked her head into a new stratosphere, one she hadn’t perceived before, ruled by golden boys who didn’t bother to swagger, whose nonchalant naming of their prep schools seemed like a secret code, who subtly and unmistakably pegged her as lower class. She chose econ as her major, leaped into the recruitment frenzy, emerged with a prime offer—and discovered it was common knowledge that the female new hires, all 10 percent, had also been screened for their looks.
She set to proving herself with ninety-hour workweeks, reaping excellent reviews and big bonuses, but like any junior banker, she was just a paper pusher, a glorified accountant. If she simply put in her hours, followed orders, and didn’t make mistakes, she was considered a good worker. Good, of course, wasn’t good enough.
She heard trading was the real action, where money and power were hers for the taking, if she dared; where there was no genteel ladder-climbing, only winners and losers; where she could, from the start, call the shots. She finagled a transfer and set to proving herself again.
She learned to woo clients and make them listen. To catch code errors in the bond books and see the big picture of the markets. To be a team player and to be completely selfish. To take abuse when she screwed up and give it right back when she felt she was right. To win, and lose, like a guy—no self-effacing, no apologizing. Even to laugh as one of the guys when they told detailed blow job jokes, created spreadsheets for rating assistants’ breasts, presented her with a “Hot Oriental Babe” nameplate—by then ironic, an affirmation that she was one of them, not one of them.
She said, “Something like that.”
“Good for you, for now. You must be strong. You must keep asking yourself—”
“What kind of woman am I?”
Grandma nodded, looking a little gratified.
Nora had always thought she knew. The kind of woman who’d never let a man betray her? The kind of woman who’d never let him back in? The kind of woman who simply said, Good riddance? The kind of woman who—like her mother, like her grandmother—ended up alone?
She blurted, “Is it really that simple? What kind of woman are you?”
Her grandmother’s face tightened again.
The turbulence had passed. Nora steeled herself. “I’m sorry. Never mind.”
Grandma patted her hand. “Suan le.”
Another phrase Nora remembered, an echo of her own: Forget it, drop it, never mind.
8
Sophie rinsed and spat, rinsed and spat. There was still an old sourness, mixed now with the soapy-sweet taste of baking soda. She stared in the mirror. In this cool, gleaming bathroom in the Hong Kong airport, she looked worse than ever. Washing her face had made her nose shinier, her zits redder. Her hair was greasy and clumped near the roots. She dabbed concealer and brushed her hair. There was no help for the excess to her cheeks, her chin, all the flesh obscuring the bone.
At the luggage carousel, Nora, Kay, Mom, and Aunt Susan seemed not to notice the suitcases circling by, while everyone else crowded and craned. Sophie set her shoulders and headed toward them. It was like she’d graduated only to end up in some nightmare summer camp where the clique of skinny, self-assured girls was her family, and she was stuck with them day and night, on the other side of the world.
